What’s a query pipeline?

This is for:

Developer System Administrator

In your Coveo organization, a query pipeline is an alternate set of rules or model associations that can be defined to modify queries.

You can define query pipelines from the Coveo Administration Console (see Manage query pipelines). You can take advantage of query pipelines when you have more than one search interface with distinct users and purposes, and you want to apply different rules or models for each interface.

Example

Your customers and partners use your community portal to self-serve and find relevant information, while your support agents use an internal service portal to find relevant public and private items. You can create a separate pipeline for each portal, defining appropriate rules for each search interface audience.

You can also use query pipeline A/B testing to evaluate rule or model changes on a subset of users.

Query pipeline rules

Query pipeline rules can define the following:

  • Search terms

  • Result rankings

    • Featured results - items appearing at the top of search results when the query meets a specific condition.

    • Ranking expressions - modifying the order of results matching specified expressions and conditions.

  • Groups & campaigns - grouping sets of result ranking rules that apply for specific contexts, audiences, or periods of time.

  • Advanced query pipeline rules

    • Filters - adding hidden query expressions to all queries that go through the query pipeline.

    • Query parameters - overriding search parameter values for every query that goes through the query pipeline.

    • Ranking weights - establishing the impact of ranking factors when establishing the order of results.

    • Triggers - establishing actions to be performed in the user search interface following an event when a condition is met.

Query pipeline model associations

The following models can be associated to a query pipeline:

See Manage models.

The features you define in a query pipeline are applied to all queries before they’re sent to the index.

Order of execution

The following diagram illustrates the overall order of execution of query pipeline features:

diagram showing order of execution

What’s next?

Learn how to create and use a query pipeline (see Manage query pipelines).